Flipbook Research: Matrix style Flipbook

I'm sure many people have seen this flipbook before, because it is absolutely amazing. It covers everything and makes even the simplest form of animation look incredibly complicated and intricate. It plays around with every camera angle and we spend little if not no time looking at a character from one position. I also love how it plays around with timing.

The Matrix is an excellent example of how great action sequences have excellent timing with the famous bullet time sequence and here, in this flipbook it is used to create the same mind blowing effect. Even if the whole thing is drawn it still feels like watching a series of highly complicated visual effects.

Pose to Pose Animation Research: Itchy and Scratchy

Pose to Pose animation is basically when a character moves from one pose to the next in an animation so instead of just non-stop running a character might run, stop and run again. Basically a main animator will plot out all the keyframes; so what positions they want the character to get into and then it is the role of the other animators to fill in the gaps with other frames.

For example we can see from the above Itchy and Scratchy cartoon; Scratchy walks outside, he stops in a position (keyframe) picks up Itchy and hugs him, stop (keyframe), then Itchy proceeds to attack him.

Frame by Frame Animation Research

Above is an example of Frame By Frame animation that I found on YouTube. As might be able to make out, below the main frame we can see many frames underneath and each frame contains the horse in a slightly different position. When the animation is played back it runs as a sequence, this sequence happens to be a running cycle. 

But unlike Pose to Pose animation there are no keyframes meaning that if an animator is animating this sequence there is no filling in the gaps, the animator will just animate from beginning to end until the shot/scene changes. Although the animation is simple in that there is no back drop, it clearly demonstrates what frame by frame animation is as we can clearly tell what we're looking at.

Evaluation

Throughout this course I have learnt so much as we've covered so much content. The entire module has been about learning animation skills and the 12 principles of animation, in particular applying the 12 principles of animation to our own work. We began with storyboarding potential animations of our own. Initially I was skeptical about storyboarding because I just wanted to dive straight into creating animation, it was soon that I learnt how important the storyboarding process is. My storyboard needed to be clear and easy to understand so it could be simple to follow if I was the animator going to animate it.

When we were tasked to create to create flip-books I felt it would be the simplest thing in the world to do. I was not at all prepared for just how much skill is involved to create a flip-book that flows well. We had to factor so many aspects into account with just a simple ball bouncing up and down movement for example timing (a problem I had with my ball animation is that my ball would move at the same speed throughout the animation when it should speed up and slow down) and squash and stretch.

I feel my flip-book animation skills have improved greatly and feel these skills can be applied to every form of animation. The concept of squash and stretch I have used on every animation I have created since, obviously this concept is much harder to apply to pixilations.

I found the Pendulum animation far easier to create than my flip-books. I feel this is because the experience I had creating my flip-books gave me more confidence that I could apply to proceeding animations. When I played my pendulum back it ran much smoother than anything I had created in the past.

I feel not only my animation skills have improved throughout the module, but so has how I approach animation. I feel like now I approach animation with a lot more planning because I now realise that without an effective plan I can only get so far without either hitting a wall or it effecting how well my animation flows.

When it came to creating a pixilation I admittedly did not dedicate as much time to it as I should have done. Because it was live-action photography I felt that I did not need to plan it out as much as a drawn animation. My lack of planning was evident when I played my final pixilation back but when I created another pixilation in Apply it allowed me the opportunity to vastly approve on my skills and create something of a far higher quality due to more thought out planning.

Overall, I have found this module incredibly interesting and I have learnt so much that I can apply to my own skills. I feel that although I still have so much to learn about even the most simplest forms of animation, I now have the confidence to try new things I would before have been to skeptical to ever attempt.

Gravity Falls

Gravity Falls is a show about two siblings, a brother and a sister who go to live with their eccentric Grand-Uncle Stan in the strange town of Gravity Falls. Throughout the series the pair embark on bizarre adventures and get themselves into extreme situations, often due to poorly thought out schemes (strange how similar all these animated series sound when I describe them. I guess if you find a formula that works you stick to it.) 

I really like the show because it gives us something different. The plot lines are completely wacky and I love shows that have well thought out universes. Often my problem with cartoons is that the world around the characters is given hardly any thought, it just seems to be set in two settings, the characters house and a local bar for example. But I love how in Gravity Falls the world is so large and there are so many different places that are explored in every episode.

Attack on Titan

Apart from being incredibly depressing to the point it'll put you in a bad mood for the rest of the week. This Japanese anime series is an incredibly good watch.



I actually found a pretty lighthearted photo which is good because wow, is it depressing. Attack on Titan is about a small society of people who live in a walled city protected from Titans. Titans are giant people basically who like killing humans for apparently no reason. One day the Titans break through one of the walls and after that event three friends Eren, Mikasa and Armin must join an elite group of people dedicated to wiping out the Titans once and for all.

What I like most about the show is not the beautiful, painstaking animation or the breathtaking action sequences of which I imagine is incredibly hard to create in animation, but is actually the characters. Throughout the one series we see these characters age five years and are given more and more back-story.

Every character is significant and complicated. Its not just a case of humans-good, Titans-bad. Frequently the three protagonists are up against everyone else as well. It covers everything, its a coming-of-age story but its also about finding your place in the world. To me even though it's called Attack on Titan it isn't really about the Titans at all, they just symbolise 'the enemy'. The Titans could just as easily be war, famine or an ecological disaster. What the show is actually about to me is how humans deal with these sort of situations and how human nature can sometimes become just as bad as the big evil.

The Amazing World of Gumball

The Amazing World of Gumball is an American animated series about a blue cat called Gumball and his adopted goldfish brother Darwin. The two characters frequently get themselves into weird situations due to poorly thought out schemes. I really like the series because to me, nothing is less interesting than a central character who is cool, popular and smart. I cannot see how anyone would find this concept interesting. One of my main problems with Adventure Time, to me an otherwise great show is that the main character is too cool and popular. To me your protagonist needs to be a bit of a loser because it gives you something to root for.



The character Gumball is likable to me because he is a bit of a loser, and an idiot.



When I began watching the show, initially I didn't like the animation style. As you can see from the images, the show uses so many different styles of animation and design. There are characters that are rendered in 3D and there are simply 2D animated characters with outlines (see Gumball's family). When I began watching the show I felt this was not inventive, it just made everything look messy. A friend of mine who loved the style explained to me that it's a show for Graphic Designers. Since then I have come to appreciate and love the style, now I understand messiness is kind of the point of it.

South Park

South Park has always been one of my favourite animations, if not favourite shows. I've watched it, got bored of it, went off it, rediscovered it, loved it etc. so many times now I've lost count. It's still on the air, I don't know what season it's on now, fairly certain it isn't too far behind The Simpsons which I'm sure many will find hard to believe. I'm sure a lot of people who loved it in the early days probably don't know its still going.



To me the show has peaked, there isn't a particular series to me that comes to mind, just every so often there's a masterpiece of an episode. What I love about this show is yes it's incredibly crude with it's rigid paper cutout animation style, it's incredibly rude with endless fart gags and many consider it incredibly offensive; it seems like every week the creators think up someone knew to annoy. But it always has a point to make.



To me it's not like something like Family Guy where its rude gags, rude gags and if you look underneath it all to try to find some sort of beating heart, you're just going to find more gags. In South Park, something I've only come aware of in the past five or so years is that if you look past the crudeness and approach it with an intelligent perspective you will see that every episode has a point to make.



My favourite episode of South Park is probably Imagination Land where terrorists bomb the magical world of the kids imagination and after chaos unfolds the US government think about the possibility of nuking Imagination Land for good. Now many people who might be slightly stubborn might just see this episode as plain offensive because Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the show's creators) are having terrorists blow up stuff in a cartoon. But I hope most intelligent people will understand the point of that episode, to me anyway is that terrorism has become such a massive thing in the public eye that so much hysteria has been created it's almost successfully invaded our imaginations.

The Life and Times of Tim

The Life and Times of Tim is an adult animated HBO series that revolves around Tim, a normal guy who frequently gets into bizarre situations. With only three series,the show has been off the air since 2012 but to me it remains memorable due to its humor and style. The animation is incredibly basic. The characters rarely move at all apart from their mouths, I can't remember actually ever seeing any of them walk.



But even though the characters look rigid and paper-thin, I never found it boring to watch. I liked the style because to me it fit the tone and added to the comedy. In fact I don't think it would have been anything like as funny if the style was more 3D for example. It's like to me if something like South Park was drawn in a much more dynamic and complicated way it wouldn't work to me because the reason both these shows work is because they can get away with such crudeness because they are so crude.

Adventure Time

Adventure Time is an American animated series about Finn the human boy and his best friend Jake the dog. Jake can talk and has the power to stretch himself like an elastic band, Finn is just a kid and has no powers.As you can probably imagine from looking at the above image, the show is completely bonkers, makes zero sense but is insanely fun.

The animation is also gobsmackingly beautiful so you can watch it, and even if you've completely lost track of the plot you can still enjoy it for its incredible colour pallet and amazing scenery. It isn't all wacky weirdness though, at the center of the show is the strong beating heart of these two central characters. One of my favourite things about television series that sets apart from the movies slightly is character development. One of my main complaints about cartoons, even my favourite of all time The Simpsons, is that there is not enough character development. In Adventure Time we're almost watching this kid grow up in this surreal world and the writers have aged him.

Obviously I'd like more character development, things pretty much go back to normal after every episode but at least over the years there has been character development to some degree.

Bee and Puppycat

Bee and Puppycat is a bizarre animation I was shown on YouTube. It is a cartoon developed by the Cartoon Hangover web channel and the show was created by Natasha Allegri. I've only seen one episode so far but from what I have seen, I have really enjoyed. The story is incredibly bizarre and the characters are very likeable, especially the main character Bee. Although she lives in a slightly surreal setting the show succeeds in making her realistic and relatable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOG_UtLxh58

I also really like the style of the show and it reminds me of a similar show of which fans of Bee and Puppycat I'd assume would be more than aware of, Adventure Time, created by Pendleton Ward. It just so happens that Ward and Allegri are friends and Allegri also works on Adventure Time so to me it is fairly easy to see where some of the inspiration comes from.

Gorillaz Do Ya Thing

Jamie Hewlett's work is going to appear on this blog a lot, sorry but he is one of my favourite artists. And to me it doesn't get better than his work on the band Gorillaz. Here I'm going to talk about the most recent music video he directed for the band before they went on a massive, unbearably long hiatus. I've loved this band for around ten years now and in that time its been amazing to watch something like this evolve and grow. The characters have changed. Rare in animations the characters have aged with the time as have their creators.


(Gorillaz band member Noodle age ten to 20)

Not only have the characters changed in their looks to keep things fresh and interesting but so has the animation style. We're now at the point, around Phase 3 where the characters are rendered in 3D CGI. At first I didn't like the style. I was annoyed because I felt that everything was turning 3D and traditional animation was dying out so it was nice that in 2010 a massively successful band like Gorillaz still animated in good old 2D. To me it felt like trying to appease fans instead of doing their own thing.



Eventually I grew to like the style and feel that it particularly works in this video set in the band's new house. To me what I feel the charm is of Gorillaz and why to this day they are so popluar is not just the music, but how these characters co-exist in their own slightly surreal universe in the music industry. They are slightly separate but kind of always want to be accepted.




To me now that these band members look more life-like they fit in a tiny bit more with the real world but still keep their insane cartoony-ness. E.G. 2D does have a more solid look and his movements are less rigid, it actually feels like if you touched him it would be more like touching a person than a piece of paper. But don't get me wrong, his eyes are still massive black circles.

Photoshop Induction

Admittedly I wasn't to keen on having a Photoshop induction. This was due mainly to me being ignorant and thinking I knew enough about the program already and that for me it might just be a waste of time. Initially I did already know about what we were doing as we started out with the basics. But then I found later on in the session that I was learning new things.

These new things were often very helpful and would be things like shortcuts and massive time savers to things I could do already. I also learnt how to mask layers and while I am confident using the eraser tool I learnt that the masking tool can be used in a way that is far more practical.

The above is a Photoshop experiment I created using a photo of a man facing the camera head on. I wanted to try to make the image look as terrifying as possible. To be honest the more I messed with the image with the tones, hues, and contrasts I feel I began to slightly ruin it.

Flipbook Research

I feel the Walt Disney Animated Studio is a very interesting use of the flip-book technique. The flip-book to me is a symbol of animation's humble beginnings. It is a technique basically accessible to most people on the planet, all you need is a few scraps of paper and a pencil. It is also my reasoning behind the fact that anyone can create an animation of some kind and it is not just for a few people who happen  to own the most advanced software.

I like that you have one logo for Walt Disney Studios that uses incredibly modern visual effects and looks just massively expensive. Thats also complicated and really represents spectacle and kind of symbolises what Disney is as this insanely massive amazingly successful empire. As you can see below, words that come to my mind when I look at this logo are, a world of pure imagination, spectacle, wealth etc.

Then you look at the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo and to me some very different words come to mind such as small, independent, quality, hand made, love etc. Instead of seeing Disney as the mass media empire that it is, here we see Disney as a far smaller independent studio sort of like how we see a small family run bakery in the food industry.

I feel this is almost entirely down to the animation style being a flip-book. It also shows that even in a modern world where it seems like Disney is taking over e.g. buying Marvel, Lucas Film Ltd. etc. Even Disney still knows this all started with a flip-book and will always have respect for the most basic of animation techniques.

Apply: Love Animation Development 2

Now that I had a DSLR camera and tripod I was all set to film my pixilation and wow, how much easier it was. You could call myself a dinosaur, I'm not often to keen about moving with the times onto new technology and often tend not to see the advantages with using the latest software. But it has to be said, once we finally figured out how to white balance the photographs the camera was easy to use and took great quality photos. See examples below:

Also the tripod helped the animation process entirely, no longer did I have to worry about not moving the camera when I captured a photo which really helped to speed everything up. In fact I have to say it was filmed very quickly in comparison to how long it would have taken had I just used my phone camera and blu tac. 

To give you some background on what the inspiration was for this pixilation. It came from seeing this photograph on some internet website. 

It's basically the relationship between a father and son throughout the years. I think the reason why the image is so impacting is because the time period is massive yet because these pictures are standing side by side they seem so sequential. It is basically one big photograph of the circle of life and could easily be continued with the son growing old. 

Our pixilations could only be a maximum of thirty seconds long so I wanted to show the relationship between a father and son over a long period of time but, like the above photo, incredibly quickly. That is why I decided to add a time lapse to the video. Well by time lapse I mean the son goes off screen, comes back on larger, then goes off screen and comes back on having grown into an adult...

Then the I thought the best way to transition the dad getting older would be for him to move to the side so you can't see his face and then to turn back around and we see that he has aged. 

When I took every photo I needed I then had to edit them together. The process was relatively simple. It all had to flow together correctly and there couldn't be any photos that had been taken by accident in there. I wasn't using Adobe After Effects, instead I was using Adobe Premier, a program I have always been fond of because its simple and easy to use but I am aware that if something is simple to use there will be limits to its capabilities. For example I had hear that on Adobe After Effects you can easily convert all the photos you have into frames and then decide on either 24 frames per xecond or 12 frames per second. 

On Premier, to the best of my knowledge, you cannot do this so I had to drag every individual photo into place on the timeline, decrease the length of how long the photo appears on screen to as mucgh as possible (in the case of Premier that is 24 FPS) and then I would compy this frame again and put it right next to tghe previos. I did this with around 414 frames. As you can probably imagine it took up most the day.

Then once I had done all this, I still wasn't finished. My pixilation overran. My pixilation was 35 seconds when the brief stated that we were allowed to create a pixilation that lasted between 20-30 seconds. I thought about maybe asking if my animation could be a few seconds longer, the timing was right and flowed just how I wanted it to. But I knew time was of the essence so decided to just buite my tongue and edit the time stretch of my animation, reducing it to 30 seconds. To be honest, the difference between the 35 and 30 second animations are very small, but I'll still keep the 35 second version.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

One of my favourite films of all time is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. To me it is absolutely incredible for many reasons, great plot, characters, incredible inventiveness. But just from an animators point of view the film is breathtaking. Now, in this day and age young viewers have been exposed to CGI characters acting alongside live action people e.g. kids cereal adverts and basically most adverts with a mascot, the movies e.g. Space Jam and Looney Tunes Back in Action.



But in 1988, no one had seen this sort of thing before. I mean cartoon characters have appeared on screen with live action actors before e.g. Mary Poppins...



...but those characters were drawn in traditional 2D style so did not have the same effect of the characters in Roger Rabbit that, rendered in 3D, look like they naturally co-exist with the humans.



I also love how Bob Hoskins interacts with the toons. The chemistry between Eddy Valiant (Hoskins) and Roger in the movie is just brilliant. That is why I admire the film so much because Hoskins basically had to create chemistry with nothing and act with nothing, something that had barely been done before had been done with incredible quality. It paved the way for not just animated movies but also movies in general.

Fell in Love With a Girl Animated Music Video

The music video for the White Stripes song Fell in Love With a Girl is perhaps my favourite music video of all time. It is all animated with Lego bricks and directed by Michel Gondry. I personally love the video because even though its animated with Lego bricks so you would think it could look slow and rigid played back like so many amateur Lego animations on YouTube, it actually runs incredibly fast with amazing pace.



I also like how even though its a Lego animation, it doesn't go with the technique I for instance would think of the most obvious way to animate, with actually Lego people as the White stripes. Instead the band members are made up with bricks which I feels gives them more fluidity. The faces of these characters have no features and the arms and legs barely look like arms and legs at all yet you can tell they are arms and legs and you can tell Jack is singing even if he has no mouth. I feel the way this is achieved is through the quality of the animation.



With very few bricks the animators have created characters that are incredibly life-like. Where they needed more emotion in a Lego characters face they did use CGI to get a better effect (see below) but for the most part it was all done with a box of bricks.

Pixilation Research: The Hardest Button to Button

When we were given the task to create a pixiliation I have to admit I was almost completely unaware of this style of animation. It was entirely new to me, or so I thought. Then I remembered the music video for The White Stripes song Hardest Button to Button. The entire video is filmed as a pixilation. The video is directed by Michel Gondry who had worked with them on another music video for the song Fell in Love With a Girl, also an animation.



The pixilation effect is used so that every time Jack strums or Meg hits the drums the frame changes and a new drum kit or amp is created thus creating a movement. I personally love the video for the incredible inventiveness and original idea. I also love the fact that even though the band is incredibly successful the music video is relatively small and not cheap but could be made on a small budget (if you disregard the countless drum kits and amps).

 

Storyboard Research: Apocalypse Now

Delving slightly out of the world of animation. I wanted to investigate other storyboards for other movies to see how they compare to animated features. On the whole storyboards for animated movies and storyboards for live-action features look basically the same in the level of detail for example. Then I came across the striking storyboards for the film Apocalypse Now.





These storyboards look very different to anything I've seen for an animated movie. If you've seen Apocalypse Now, particularly this iconic helicopter scene then you will understand the intesity of that movie and how difficult it would be to represent that intesity through drawings. Some how the artist has managed to accomplish that here, the drawings are incredibly sketchy, there are so many lines. There is nothing inviting or comforting about these images, the helicopters in the third image look to me more like deadly wasps.

In the second and first image you can see the emotions in these characters faces. Before looking at live-action film storyboards I had assumed it was not that important to capture character emotion in the drawings because its going to be acted, not animated. I now realise how ignorant that view is and understand that it is just as important to capture character emotion in a live action storyboard as in an animated movie storyboard.